1
Racializing and Embodying Omnivorous Consumption: Evidence from the Tourism of
Capoeira in Salvador, Brazil
By Danielle Hedegard
Abstract: This study integrates literature on omnivorism with the racialization perspective to
explain how blackness becomes valuable in omnivorous consumption. I use a case study to show
how interactions transform capoeira – a Brazilian martial art and popular tourist attraction – into
omnivorous cultural capital. Participant observation revealed that a Brazilian capoeira studio
successfully attracted foreign tourists because its Brazilian practitioners mutually constructed
with tourists the meanings of capoeira. They associated capoeira objects and bodies with
symbols of blackness recognizable to tourists as authentic --specifically Africa, slavery, and the
black male body. Blackness became synthesized with an omnivorous disposition toward non-
commercial, authentic, and experiential consumption. Interactions ascribed this synthesis of
meanings to dark skin toned Brazilian bodies, and tourists then embodied these cultural
distinctions by physically interacting with these bodies. Findings contribute to understandings of
omnivorous consumption, the social construction of blackness, and mechanisms through which
marginalized symbols become valued.
Keywords: Blackness, Capoeira Tourism, Experiential Consumption, Omnivorism, Racial
Meaning
2
Racializing and Embodying Omnivorous Consumption: Evidence from the Tourism of
Capoeira in Salvador, Brazil
1. Introduction
The popular Lonely Planet Guide to Brazil claims that the city of Salvador, Brazil and the
cultural practices of its inhabitants embody blackness both within Brazil and globally. It asserts
that Salvador is “the African soul of Brazil…[where] the descendants of African slaves have
preserved their cultural roots more than anywhere else in the New World, successfully
transforming them into thriving culinary, religious, musical, dance and martial art traditions”
(Louis et al., 2005: 413). This positive framing of blackness – a repertoire of symbols tied to an
institutionalized racial category – in the context of international tourism represents an important
and understudied set of symbols within the trend towards broad and culturally distant, or
cosmopolitan omnivorous, consumption (Cheyne and Binder, 2010; Peterson and Kern, 1996).
Recent evidence that blackness is a key piece of the cosmopolitan omnivore’s cultural
repertoire (Cheyne and Binder, 2010; Grazian, 2003) prompts the questions, which symbols of
blackness do omnivores value and how do they acquire and give meaning to them? To answer
these questions, I use the case of the tourism of capoeira – a Brazilian martial art tied to a
discourse of Afro-Brazilian culture – at one tourist-oriented studio in Salvador, Brazil. Long-
term participant observation allowed me to focus on the how of cultural valorization (Johnston
and Baumann 2007) – by examining the interactive process through which racial meanings
emerge and become attached to capoeira – rather than relying on survey and interview methods.
This analysis reveals how consumers construct meaning in interaction with particular contexts
3
(in our case, with the producers of cultural objects), and should be generalizable to a variety of
consumption contexts.
I find that Brazilian practitioners and tourists co-constructed the meanings of capoeira by
connecting capoeira objects to symbols of blackness recognizable to tourists within the market
for cultural difference -- specifically Africa, slavery, and Afro-Brazilian cultural objects.1
Interactions ascribed this synthesis of meanings to dark skin toned Brazilian bodies, and tourists
then acquired these cultural distinctions by physically interacting with these bodies. The
meanings that emerged resonated with tourists’ disposition toward cosmopolitan omnivorous
consumption -- specifically authenticity and experience.
2. Relevant Literature
2.1. Blackness and Omnivorous Consumption
An extensive literature debates the types of omnivorous consumers and their role in
society, but this work generally agrees that they represent an important trend in modern cultural
taste and consumption patterns (Atkinson, 2011; Bennett et al., 2009; Garcia-Alvarez et al.,
2007; Holt, 1997; Ollivier, 2008; Van Eijck, 2001). In contrast to older cultural status markers
such as theater and classical music, omnivores value a broad range of cultural objects (Peterson
and Kern, 1996). These tastes can operate as a new and nuanced form of status display and
symbolic exclusion (Johnston and Baumann, 2007).
1 Cultural objects are material or practical aspects of culture. They have symbolic properties
defined largely by their connections to other symbols. They exist as macro-level collective
representations available to actors to adapt in concrete situations.
4
Cosmopolitan omnivores are members of the upper middle class who prefer a breadth of
cultural genres, often tied to physically or socially distant places (Cheyne and Binder, 2010;
Holt, 1997; Thompson and Tambyah, 1999). They prefer cultural objects framed as authentic,
exotic, and otherwise socially distant. Racial symbols are present but underappreciated in this
literature. Omnivores now seek out esoteric versions of Southern foods and rare ethnic foods and
rap music tied to racial ghettos and foreigners (Cheyne and Binder, 2010; Johnston and
Baumann, 2007). Likewise, audiences like blues musicians poor and black (Grazian, 2003) and
outsider artists uneducated and non-white (Fine, 2003).
Authenticity is central to cosmopolitan omnivores. Authenticity is a socially constructed
meaning rather than a property inherent to objects (Peterson, 1997), and what constitutes
authenticity varies across audiences. It is often tied to exoticism (Johnston and Baumann, 2007;
Lu and Fine, 1995), non-commercialism (Grazian, 2003), and continuity with the past (Johnston
and Baumann, 2007). Racial identity (Chong, 2011), personal biographies (Fine, 2003), human
bodies (Bruner, 2005), and subtle enactment of cultural knowledge are also vital to establishing
authenticity of artistic producers.
Cosmopolitan omnivores also value active consumption – rather than taste alone
(DiMaggio and Mukhtar, 2004; Han, 2003; Ollivier, 2008). Interactive consumption provides
experiences with authentic producers of cultural otherness (Peñaloza, 2001; Thompson and
Tambyah, 1999). Grazian shows that black jazz musicians are viewed as authentic and “white
audiences still expected to be entertained by black singers” (2003: 20). This suggests that
audience perception of the naturalness and legitimacy of race and authenticity are vital in
omnivorous consumption.
5
2.2.Constructing Blackness
To examine how symbols of blackness become attached to omnivorous consumption in
actual consumption settings, I employ the racialization or “race-making” perspective (Brubaker
et al., 2004). Race is a socially constructed and malleable set of meanings that people attach to
bodies and objects. Actors use physical traits, assumed to be primordial and essential (usually
phenotype which is itself socially constructed), to create symbolic boundaries between members
and nonmembers (Cornell and Hartmann, 2007). This can create racial identities, categories, and
groups. Thus, racialization assigns people to categories, applies racially charged symbols to
bodies, and creates a racial interpretation of social experience.
Racial symbols take on meaning through their connection to other symbols and
opposition to those outside of a given racial boundary. They can derive from societal
classifications, meso-level narratives, and micro-level interactions. Many symbols establish
racial meaning, though common referents are the body (skin tone, hair, facial features, and
styles), geographic specificity (specific continents, regions, and city neighborhoods), narratives
and discourses (of people hood, difference, and politics), socioeconomic status, language,
material objects, names, and ancestry (Lewis, 2003; Nagel, 1994; Soar, 2001). Symbols must be
interpreted in specific context; however, racial discourse and the symbols it draws upon are
deeply embedded historical narratives that influence everyday life and interaction – even when
race is not a consciously salient element of interpretation (Omi and Winant, 1994).
Racial meanings often remain unspoken and unconscious; however, in these moments
they are strongest because they flow from bodily performance, appearing as a natural and
6
legitimate disposition (Bourdieu, 1991) of a primordially black body.2 Blackness is embodied
through cultural performance such as hairstyles, language use, dress, a taste for racialized music,
and familiarity with cultural etiquette (Johnson, 2003). Sometimes, the performance of race is
central to establishing the meaning of other cultural objects, such as jazz (Grazian, 2003), hip
hop (Cheyne and Binder, 2010), and folk music (Roy, 2004). I show how the meanings attached
to the bodies of capoeira practitioners migrate to the objects of capoeira through interactions
between practitioners and tourists.
3. An Empirical Case: Capoeira Tourism in Salvador, Brazil
3.1 Tourism
Tourism is a key context in which to examine experience and racial otherness in
omnivorous consumption. Tourism frames a place, its culture, and its people the middle and
upper middle classes of industrialized nations (Grazian, 2003; MacCannell, 1989; Mowforth and
Munt, 2009; Wherry, 2008), producing “cultural difference and the distinct valorization of local
authenticity to stimulate people to visit a place to consume its characteristics” (Gotham, 2007:
214).3
2 The constructionist view negates that race is biologically determined, but many individuals
continue to perceive race as primordial (Cornell and Hartmann, 2007).
3 An extensive literature on cultural tourism investigates how market forces and foreign tourist
perceptions shape local culture (Nash and Smith, 1991).
7
3.2 Capoeira
A capoeira studio4 provides a strategic site in which to observe blackness in omnivorous
consumption. First, because capoeira is interactional and embodied (Delamont and Stephens,
2008; Lewis, 1992), I can observe the meanings which emerge through repeated interactions
among practitioners and tourists. Capoeira is a game to practitioners, but outsiders refer to it as a
Brazilian martial art. Like sports, capoeira combines adherence to norms and rules of conduct
with creative enactment to outplay an opponent. Practitioners form a large ring (the roda) with
their bodies and two practitioners play within the roda. This play is a call and response of dance,
fight, gymnastics, and martial arts movements, in which practitioners improvise combinations of
movements and observe a set of rules and ritual behaviors. Practitioners are also musical
performers; a bateria – or musical ensemble – plays Brazilian instruments, practitioners sing and
clap a call and response, and the rhythm of the music determines the play in the roda. In studios,
students train for years, doing strength and flexibility training, learning to embody the
movements (Downey, 2010), and playing innovatively with opponents.
Second, capoeira is an established member of the global culture repertoire, and is popular
among foreign tourists. Capoeirista.com lists over 2000 formal capoeira studios in 99 countries
as of July 2011. Capoeira moved abroad beginning in the mid-1970s when a capoeira dance
troupe traveled to New York City to perform. By 1979, the group’s organizer opened the first
studio in the US.
4 A studio is an organization located in a fixed space where training normally takes place.
8
Third, originally developed among freed African slaves in Brazil, capoeira meaning
draws on a complex discourse on race (Browning, 1995; Santos, 2005; Travassos, 1999).5
Empirical work in the UK and Canada finds that capoeira practitioners in these countries
construct authentic capoeira as Brazilian (de Campos Rosario et al., 2010; Delamont and
Stephens, 2008). Joseph argues that Brazilian practitioners market themselves and their product
as authentic Afro-Brazilian culture to appeal to students desire to “escape the everyday, that is,
the artificiality of mainstream Euro-Canadian culture” (2008: 501).6 While global culture asserts
the blackness of capoeira, only some capoeira studios in Brazil assert blackness as important to
the practice (Travassos, 1999). An ambiguous racial context in Brazil limits public and private
speech on discrimination and slave history among Brazilians (Sheriff, 2000). Put simply,
capoeira is an abstract and collectively available set of representations institutionalized in Brazil
and in global culture.
5 After years of repression, the Brazilian state began promoting capoeira as a national sport in the
1930s. This led to the incorporation of Asian martial arts and gymnastics movements in a
stylistic variant called Capoeira Regional, followed by the naming of the older form as Capoeira
Angola. The studio examined here called its style “contemporary,” using elements of the two
older styles.
6 Assuncão (2005: 212) asserts that capoeira is a “globalized subculture of protest”, which
resonates with marginalized populations.
9
3.3 Salvador
Salvador is the second most toured city in Brazil, receiving international tourists mainly
from the US and Western Europe (SCT, 2005).7 Salvador and the state of Bahia – where the city
is located – are the epicenter of Brazil’s contribution to globalized blackness. It was the place of
Brazil’s “Reafricanization” movement in the 1980s, which renewed interest in Africa, capoeira,
samba-reggae,8 and Candomblé9 -- now globally-recognized objects of Afro-Brazilian culture10
(Joseph, 2008; Sansone, 2003). Many argue that Salvador – the study location – is the birthplace
of capoeira. In 2008, the Bahian State’s database of cultural organizations lists around 130
studios in Salvador,11 though another source estimates there are at least 2000 formal and
informal groups in the city (Loez, 2005: 15).
3.4 Participant Observation
Cultural practice and racial construction are both embodied phenomenon that demand a
methodology sensitive to how people enact and perceive subtle bodily cues and casual
comments. I chose to focus exclusively on one studio to thoroughly examine this process.12
7 Salvador is Brazil’s third largest city, and was the country’s first capital.
8 A musical style that combines samba and classic reggae rhythms.
9 A syncretic religion that aligns Catholic saints and African deities called orishas.
10 Afro-Brazilian objects refer to cultural practices and material objects viewed as originating
among the African slave population of Brazil. However, these objects have undergone extensive
reinterpretation and adaptation over the years.
11 Database accessed at: www.censocultural.ba.gov.br.
12 My goal was not to explain the presentation of capoeira in a population of studios.
10
I gathered data from June to August 2007 and again from August to November 2008,
through participant observation in classes four times per week (classes averaged three hours),
social outings with Brazilians and tourists, and informal conversations. Data took the form of
extensive field notes written after each class (Emerson et al., 1995). I focused observations on
my theoretical interest in the subtle process of how omnivores consumed capoeira (Burawoy,
1998). In order to examine this culture of practice – where underlying cultural codes and
knowledge can be deployed rather than a discursive culture – Lizardo and Strand (2010) suggest
taking as a unit of analysis the relationship between embodied dispositions and the external
institutional environment. This meant observing how actors’ embodiment of blackness and
capoeira related to the interactional environment of tourism. I then linked these observations to
the broader social force of omnivorism. Racial constructions were objects of investigation rather
than pre-defined units of analysis; as I show below, blackness became a central but not exclusive
resource for meaning-making at the studio. As a white, female, US citizen, practitioners recruited
me to participate in classes and social outings and placed me in the same category as tourists.13
13 My awareness of my raced, gendered, and classed social positions within the studio certainly
shaped my data. Brazilians viewed me as a tourist, rather than as a researcher, which taught me
how the Brazilian practitioners presented capoeira to tourists. It also influenced my interactions
with the many male practitioners who were more interested in recruiting me for social activities
than in discussing capoeira. A detailed consideration of these issues will be made available as an
online supplement.
11
4. From Capoeira Practice to Racialized Cosmopolitan Consumption
4.1. Description of Capoeira World
The neighborhood sat at a distance from the Tourist Center, but was easily accessible, by
bus and foot, to tourists. The area was dotted with a combination of tall apartment buildings,
secondary schools, and businesses ranging from small copy offices to convenience stores. Small
open-air bars offered a limited selection of beer, liquor, and soft drinks and a few plastic tables
along crumbling front sidewalks.
Capoeira World’s building was one of the largest I have seen. The main lobby housed a
reception desk, usually manned by a young female employee from the neighborhood, a wooden
bench, drinking fountain and several framed black and white photos of capoeira practitioners
from the early twentieth century. The ground level also contained an office where the master and
advanced student gather to discuss the group’s business, a small workout room, and a larger
room with seven computers connected to the internet. The studio’s funding came from revenue
from nightly classes, a monthly instrument making workshop (both attended mainly by tourists),
presentations for local Portuguese language schools catering to foreigners, and government-
sponsored grants for children’s classes.
Capoeira World’s master, Angel, was a light skin toned,14 thirty-seven-year-old high
school graduate, generously tattooed with various capoeira symbols. His parents were lawyers.
After training throughout childhood with a well-known master in Salvador, followed by two
years in Europe working as a instructor, he returned to Salvador and opened his own group. He
became a well-known mestrando (person in the process of becoming a master) in the capoeira
14 Those I describe as light skin toned would be viewed as white in the US. Those I describe as
dark skin toned would be viewed as black in the US.
12
community. Through invitations to capoeira events around the world, Angel visited dozens of
countries, and made regular visits to his alumni's studios to lead classes and attend batizados.
Several of his advanced students also traveled abroad with him and on their own to capoeira
events.
Most of the studio’s Brazilian students lived in the surrounding middle-class
neighborhood. The studio’s advanced Brazilian practitioners also lived in the neighborhood, but
these students grew up in nearby lower class neighborhoods and joined the studio through free
classes offered to low-income children.
Tourism at the studio included short-term tourists that attended one or two classes and
others that attended for several weeks or months. Tourists were almost all light skin-toned,
twenty-something, middle class college students or recent graduates from the United States and
Europe. They were well-traveled individuals interested in a variety of cultural genres. I argue
that these young college-age tourists are important as budding members of the upper middle
class. Interviews revealed that these tourists’ parents have upper middle class occupations. The
cost of traveling to Brazil excludes working class people from this tourism. Portuguese language
skill varied among tourists from no language ability to intermediate, but most were at the
intermediate level. None had advanced Portuguese comprehension skills.15
15 The visual and embodied symbols described in the analysis were the primary cultural objects
available to tourists. Much of the nuance of capoeira skill, conversations among Brazilians, and
internal struggles at the studio were beyond tourists’ language skills.
13
4.2. Enacting Experiential Consumption
Extensive interactions between Brazilian practitioners and tourists transformed embodied
capoeira knowledge into an interactive consumption experience. In nightly classes, a fairly
standardized and basic workout routine structured the three-hour training, and most tourists
whispered, through gasps for air, that the class was difficult. At the end of each class, a short
thirty-minute roda allowed visitors and Brazilians to play in the roda environment. The master16
orchestrated these rodas, allowing each tourist to take a quick turn playing in the roda with a
Brazilian. Brazilians performed basic kicks and defense movements and encouraged tourists to
practice the movements taught in class. Brazilian practitioners also policed the rodas, chapping
loudly and encouraging the foreigners to keep the circle of bodies in form, clap to the rhythm,
and sing the response chorus to the various songs.17 After each tourist had a turn in the roda,
Brazilian practitioners played amongst themselves. Tourists looked on, mouthing song lyrics,
clapping, taking photographs and filming with digital cameras, or looking confused about the
process unfolding before them.
During recruitment sessions every few months, the master and advanced students
demonstrated instruments and capoeira play for groups of foreign Portuguese language-program
students. These interactive presentations introduced tourists to the embodied practice of capoeira
and the racialized bodies of its practitioners:
16 A master or mestre is a practitioner that has reached the end of the training period – which
normally includes a lengthy period teaching capoeira students.
17 Songs all draw on a call-and-response format in which one practitioner sings lengthy call
lyrics and the roda members sing back a short repetitive response.
14
The master told the group of at least forty North Americans they would do a
quick workout and had them form a circle, and explained that this formation was the
roda where practitioners played a game of capoeira. An advanced Brazilian student
placed a bench at the front of the circle and four more sat down with instruments
while another student brought a tall hand drum to the end of the bench. They began to
play instruments and after an introductory song sung solo by one of the Brazilian
practitioners, the master played in the roda with several Brazilian students as five
Brazilians sang and played instruments simultaneously. The North Americans were
crowded around the small circle vying for a position from which to see the show.
Other Brazilians began to clap loudly, circling the roda and encouraging the North
Americans to clap by clapping loudly in front of the tourists. The speed of the rhythm
increased and the Brazilians’ movements sped up as well. High kicks began to fly
between the practitioners in the roda as the North Americans clapped and looked on
wide-eyed. The rhythm increased further and several sweat-soaked Brazilians, having
removed their t-shirts, practiced flips and acrobatic moves in the roda. The human
circle enlarged as the North Americans backed away from the flying legs, but
Brazilian practitioners encouraged them to move forward. A North American ran to
his bag to retrieve a digital camera and began photographing the show, which led to a
flood of visitors retrieving their cameras. Soon several were standing on chairs in
order to get a good view of the show in the roda. Several North American females
began to whisper and point towards the dark, muscle-bound young Brazilian males
now wearing only white pants and their colored belt. Finally, the roda climaxed and
the musicians began playing a slower rhythm again.
15
Panting Brazilian practitioners stood to the sides and the master motioned for
the Brazilians to take the visitors into the roda. A Brazilian walked into the roda and
took the arm of a pale blond female, who looked horrified and shook her head no. He
motioned for her to come forward into the center of the circle. She timidly shuffled
forward looking around, clueless. He took her to the front to the roda and squatted
with her. Slowly doing a cartwheel into the circle and motioning for her to do the
same, he got her into the roda with him and began to ginga18 slowly. She stood
awkwardly staring at him and swaying from foot to foot. He squatted and motioned
for her to kick over his head, which she did, laughing from embarrassment. Then he
shook her hand and she quickly went back to the outskirts of the circle. Brazilians
repeated this with two additional North American visitors before the more outgoing
tourists went forward on their own after asking a friend to photograph them in the
roda. When they finished the show, everyone was sweating in the stifling room.
(Field notes)
To complement this interactive experience, the studio framed its activities as existing
outside of the tourism market. (Though the studio derived most of its revenue from tourists.)
Brazilian students rarely attended the studio activities popular among tourists. However,
Brazilian instructors drew on distinctions between tourism and the taken-for-granted practices of
the studio, framing these activities as natural aspects of capoeira culture. They offered a
berimbau-making class that seven tourists and no Brazilians took during my time with the group.
18 The ginga is a central swaying step in capoeira in which the practitioner shifts his weight from
leg to leg while swinging his arms to protect himself.
16
Flexível, the resident berimbau-maker and an advanced practitioner, told me that his berimbaus
are all over the world:
During a berimbau-making workshop, Brent, an enthusiastic light skin-
toned19-year-old North American, attending an elite US university, asked the
Brazilian instructor where people buy berimbaus. Flexível, the instructor,
replied that people buy from the studio. He told Brent that the pretty painted
berimbaus at the Mercado Modelo, the local tourist craft market, looked nice
and may even sound good, but were not made to last. “They won’t hold the
good sound over years like a professional berimbau will,” said Flexível,
referring to his berimbaus as professional. He explained that it was important
to put the instrument together well, taking time and using the right parts. Brent
said, “Yeah those are more for tourists” and Flexível agreed, saying they were
good for decorating your walls. He said there were berimbaus in the building
that had been there for twenty years, though twelve years was average. (Field
notes, quotes my translation from Portuguese)
Claim-making regarding authenticity became explicit only when tourists asked these
direct questions. More often, objects subtly implied the non-tourism focus of the studio.
Numerous capoeira-related items were available in the tourist center – tambourines, drums,
berimbaus, other instruments, pants and t-shirts in many bright colors, and silver necklaces with
miniature berimbau charms. Brightly painted berimbaus in a variety of sizes, in lengths from one
foot to over five feet, were the most visible. The studio did not display or use any of these items,
instead non-painted natural wood berimbaus and instruments were used. Several North American
17
participants in the berimbau workshops told me that painting or decorating their hand-made
berimbau would “ruin it.”
Tourists viewed the taken-for-granted way that practitioners played instruments, sang,
and played in the roda as strong evidence of the studio’s non-tourism character. When tourists
arrived, they would find Brazilian practitioners practicing the berimbau or capoeira movements
alone in the workout room, the berimbau-maker cleaning gourds to construct new instruments,
and Brazilians gathered to socialize. The majority of foreign visitors saw these Brazilians as
legitimate practitioners rather than tour operators. Jack, a North American tourist, told me:
They're native Portuguese speakers...and all of the songs are in Portuguese, they
really get the songs... partially because we're in Brazil and it’s the Brazilian spirit… a
lot more experienced people... I like seeing Ouro sing because he fuckin’ really gets
into it. His eyes role back into his head... A lot of people here are like that. (Field
notes)
Brazilian practitioners saw capoeira as a profession. This interpretation, constructed through
years of socialization at the studio, made public performances, travel, and photographs a normal
part of their lives as capoeira practitioners.
The group also aligned capoeira with consumer tastes for understated commercialism.
Tourists valued this, and many complained of street vendors constantly asking them to purchase
things, especially in the city’s tourist center. The studio charged roughly $35 per month for
unlimited classes. Though the fee was more than that at nearby capoeira studios, it was
comparable to the fees charged in the Tourist Center and was a small expense for tourists. There
was no price list posted in the building. At recruitment events, the Master would quickly remark
that they offered classes “if anyone is interested.” The receptionist informed inquiring tourists of
18
the price and received their money. Tourists were required to pay to attend classes, and the
receptionist gave them a quick reminder when their month had expired, asking if they planned to
train for another month rather than asking for money.
Brazilians would, every other month or whenever there was a fresh group of tourists,
announce a berimbau-making workshop in which individuals could make the large bowed
instrument from raw materials over several weekends. When tourists inquired individually about
the class, Brazilian practitioners would tell them the price. The Master told his advanced
students, in private, not to ask the tourists for money and to treat them how they would treat a
friend.
The studio also sold capoeira workout pants with the group’s logo stitched on one leg, as
well as logo t-shirts in a variety of designs and colors. An inconspicuous rack displaying one of
each item sat in the reception area at night. No prices were given on the clothing. Many missed
the rack until a tourist appeared in class wearing the clothing. The receptionist gave them prices
when they inquired and allowed them to try on the clothes. Again, the price was reasonable to
tourists – roughly $17, and less than the price in the Tourist Center.
4.3. Synthesizing Experiential Consumption with Authentic Blackness
4.3.1. Background Aesthetics
In a limited way, the physical space of Capoeira World asserted a common geographical
referent of blackness – Africa. This created an aesthetic background for capoeira practice. The
few wall adornments in the workout room were mainly of African reference. These included
framed black and white photographs of Africans in traditional tribal wear, an African war shield,
a poster depicting and describing the shield and several other African artifacts, a large tapestry in
19
a black and yellow geometric design, and a collection of tall drums. The number of instruments
displayed greatly exceeded the number commonly used during practice (one atabaque19, three
berimbaus, and one tambourine) and always increased before recruitment events. The Master had
acquired many of these instruments during his travels to capoeira events abroad.
4.3.2. Discourse
African symbols remained in the background, but the group made extensive explicit
connections between capoeira and a historical narrative of slavery. During recruitment
presentations, a speaker – introduced as an important capoeira historian – gave tourists their first
lesson in the racial meaning of capoeira. The historian was important because the studio
presented him as an official and respected authority on capoeira – someone the tourists should
accept as legitimate. His lecture introduced tourists to the studio and to one limited version of
capoeira history and meaning. The symbols he describes reappear in the studio’s adornments and
in the appearance of several of its young male practitioners. He was also the main source of
information about capoeira history and philosophy for the Brazilian practitioners at the studio.
This historian drew on a narrative of African slavery in Brazil, framing capoeira as a
practice tied to blackness and different from modern cultural forms, Asian martial arts, and
sports. He firmly established it as a cultural legacy of slavery and blacks, as a group, and linked
the studio to this legacy. His narrative presented blacks as the natural holders of capoeira,
silencing the popularity of capoeira among the whiter Brazilian middle class. He did not mention
that Capoeira World was founded by a middle class Brazilian.
19 A tall wooden hand drum.
20
During a presentation for nearly thirty-five North American study-abroad
students, the speaker showed the group a grainy black and white ten-minute film,
made in 1954 he said, of a capoeira game. Two high-pitched berimbaus played in the
background as two shirtless dark skin toned men wearing oversized white pants
played a game of capoeira. The movements and style of their game was markedly
different from Capoeira World’s style and was clearly Capoeira Angola, though the
speaker never mentioned this. The speaker told them that capoeira was prohibited
during and after slavery officially ended, calling it a form of play for the slaves. He
said this play still comes through in the practice today. He described the forests where
slaves and ex-slaves had trained capoeira in Brazil. He then defined it as a
"demonstration of freedom of the slave” and as a symbolic game – a fight that does
not appear to be a fight. He went on to say that capoeira was related to the everyday
lives of the slaves and gave an example of the cocorinho, a squatting movement used
to duck beneath an opponent’s kick, telling them that the movement symbolized how
slaves squatted on the ground to eat. By the end of the forty-minute presentation, one
North American asked the speaker if the group only practiced Capoeira Angola.
The speaker then differentiated the Capoeira World’s capoeira practice from
elites as a social group. He described past attempt to turn it into a national gymnastic
and a military training program as a failed enterprise of whites. Using binary racial
categories – brancos and negros – he called elite capoeira practice an attempt by
whites to appropriate capoeira from blacks, something that, according to him, failed
to a prevailing “capoeira do negro,” or black popular capoeira.
21
Next, he told the visitors that capoeira was a social project and form of black
political mobilization. He explained to them that political participation in Brazil
commonly takes the form of social service projects rather than direct political action
as it does in the US. This was a brief excursion from his historical narrative, and he
never clarified if he was referring to the original creation of capoeira amongst slaves
or its contemporary use in social service programs.
The speaker went on to differentiate capoeira from Asian martial arts by
defining the content of capoeira as knowledge of the mind rather than the physical
contact he linked to Asian martial arts, saying that it required more knowledge that
Asian martial arts. He claimed that it was different from Judo and Karate, “which are
full contact,” silencing the full contact grappling movements present in modern
capoeira and, importantly, in studio’s style of capoeira. He concluded that it was
different from sports, saying, “Watch the Olympics and you won't find a sport like
capoeira.” He also compared the practice to boxing which he said was nothing more
that a series of full frontal attacks, involving no thought. (Field notes, quotes my
translation from Portuguese)
The historian’s speech silenced the cultural transformations capoeira underwent over the
past century. It omitted inclusion of movements from Asian martial arts, which were becoming
popular in Brazil in the 1930s (Assuncão, 2005). The speech established capoeira as a slave
practice by drawing on a narrative familiar to North Americans, and established its homogeneity
as a black cultural activity. Further, the other distinctions asserted (between capoeira and sport,
Asian martial art, and elite practice) are well-established cultural categories among consumers
from the US and Europe. He discussed capoeira in historical terms and said nothing of its
22
practice at present, the field of competitors, stylistic differences, or the wide social base of
practitioners in and beyond Brazil. When one North American asked what it was like today, the
speaker replied, “Now it is considered patrimony of Brazil,” without elaborating. (My translation
from Portuguese.)
4.3.3. Interactions
Most meanings of capoeira at the studio emerged from interaction between tourists and
Brazilians, rather than through the conscious decisions and framing on the part of either group.
Repeated interactions solidified meanings in the studio. The historian was an important
exception and his description of capoeira important because they reinforces the frames of the
tourism market and set the tone for subsequent interactions within the studio. Blackness became
attached to common, taken-for-granted elements of capoeira culture and practitioners lives. In
practice, meanings were enacted simultaneously as foreigners connected the necklace of one
practitioner and the dreadlocks of another with skilled bodily practice by dark skin toned young
men. These bodily cues were visible in a space where others played berimbaus connected to a
narrative of slave resistance against a backdrop of African artifacts.
Tourist-practitioner interactions extended this narrative to objects of capoeira, most
centrally the berimbau. Brazilian practitioners and tourists drew on widely known historical
myths in the capoeira community:
At the end of one berimbau music lesson attended by five North Americans, Brent
asked the instructor about the importance of berimbau music. Drawing on a common
capoeira myth, he asked, “Is it true there’s a special berimbau rhythm the slaves used
to signal the approach of the police?” The instructor, a light skin toned advanced
23
practitioner, raised his eyebrows and responded, “Yes, that’s one story. Capoeira used
to be outlawed. They had to be aware.” He went on, reviewing the myth for the North
Americans, telling them that because the police persecuted capoeiristas20 as
practitioners of a violent activity, the freed slaves that practiced capoeira had
developed a special berimbau rhythm to alert practitioners that police were arriving.
He explained that berimbau players would play a dance rhythm and everyone
involved would dance to hide the capoeira game from police. (Field notes, quotes my
translation from Portuguese.)
Objects of Afro-Brazilian culture also became connected to capoeira in Brazilian-tourist
interactions, excluding other types of Brazilian music and cultural activities from taking place
within Capoeira World. Typically, these objects include samba music and dance, capoeira,
drumming, maculelé,21 and Candomblé. The studio referred to capoeira as “Afro-Brazilian
tradition” on posters and advertisements for its numerous events, including a large banner that
hung in a secondary workout room. More importantly, the studio linked capoeira to these
practices by including samba dancing and maculelé in classes when new tourists arrived. Samba
was a regular finale to rodas, and the studio held occasional samba dance parties on Fridays.
Interaction sustained the racial meanings of these symbols. Tourists and practitioners
used what were often to Brazilians mundane objects of capoeira and their lives as cues for
attaching racial meanings. Tourists often asked Brazilians to teach them samba dance moves
after classes and inquired about practitioners’ lives and appearance. For example, several
Brazilians wore necklaces – popular in Brazil – with a small charm containing an image of a
20 Capoeirista translates as someone that practices capoeira seriously.
21 A dance performed between two individuals holding and beating wooden sticks.
24
catholic saint attached to the front and another to the back of the necklace. Much conversation
among tourists in the locker room revolved around deciphering the meaning of these necklaces.
Usually at least one female in the changing room had asked a Brazilian about the necklaces and
could offer an explanation to the others – these were saints linked to Candomblé, which offered
them protection. Conversations framed these necklaces as a part of afro-Brazilian religion, which
offered practitioners protection. One North American female used a locker room discussion
about the necklaces to relate her trip with one of the Brazilian practitioners to see a babalorixá –
a Candomblé priestess who practices divination – he knew in an adjoining neighborhood. The
North American related that the woman had thrown a handful of búzios – white sea shells – to
read her future, and after had given her one of these necklaces. Tourists used necklaces to engage
a Brazilian in conversation, touching the necklace around a neck and asking what it meant.
Brazilians were accustomed to this question, welcoming the female attention and telling them
that it was “a part of our culture, which protects us in the roda.” (My translation from
Portuguese.) Some Brazilians linked these necklaces to Candomblé, while others did not.
However, in locker room conversations, tourists transformed the necklaces into a link between
capoeira and Afro-Brazilian religion and capoeira practitioners into bearers of afro-Brazilian
culture.
Tourists complained when local reality diverged from their expectations. Melissa
complained, “Men aren’t supposed to be selling acarajé. I want my Baiana,”22 after seeing a
man selling the common food on the street earlier in the day. In other words, she expected to see
only dark skin toned women dressed in the elaborate white skirt and headdress associated with
Candomblé adherents working as acarajé vendors. She joked with another tourist that someone
22 A woman from Bahia and to female acarajé street venders dressed in costume.
25
should report him to the cultural commission of Salvador. Melissa was a 21-year-old college
senior of Mexican-American descent from California. She was enthusiastic and outgoing,
providing salsa dancing classes to local schoolchildren, taking a Portuguese language class, and
attending the capoeira classes regularly for several months.
4.4. Distributing Capoeira to Human Bodies
The assertions of the capoeira historian, the studio’s inclusion of Afro-Brazilian objects,
and the larger frames of the tourism market provided symbols and meanings of blackness that
tourists attached to practitioners’ physical appearance in interactions. Certain bodies – those of
dark skin tone, even relative armatures – became authentic capoeira bodies for tourists through
this process. Fine argues that “the authenticity of the artist justifies the authenticity of the art
work” (2003: 175), and at Capoeira World, racializing capoeira bodies also had a reciprocal
effect on the meaning of capoeira. This shaped who could produce authentic capoeira, and
tourists preferred dark skin toned male capoeira practitioners over others.
Tattoos and dreadlocks were taken-for-granted styles for the men, common among
Salvador’s large lower class population (Figueiredo, 1994). Four male practitioners had
dreadlocks and two others wore large afros. The women liked these hairstyles. They often helped
the males with afros and twists maintain their styles, gathering around these men before and after
classes to tighten uncoiling hair twists with their hands.
One practitioner, Rapido, had a noticeable tattoo on his torso of the aged face of a male.
A female tourist asked him about the meaning of the tattoo, touching it. Rapido would reply that
the face is that of the Preto Velho, a mythical figure known as the wise black father, and asked
the woman if she knew who the man was. When she said no, Rapido launched into a lengthy
26
explanation of the importance of the figure in his life as a capoeirista, reminding his to be
watchful in all of life’s situations and in the roda. The woman gave a slight nod and raised her
eyebrows in response, only partially understanding his Portuguese she told me later, asking me to
explain what he had said.
Dark skin was also popular among the almost exclusively twenty-something female
tourists. These encounters often served as an introduction to a romantic relationship between
tourists and Brazilians, as Sarah explained:
Some girls obviously show up just to see, you know, the hot black guys, which they
[the Brazilians] welcome – a lot. So many North American girls come to see the black
Brazilians, to see them and meet them and have fun with them. Baians are also very
proud of the black African culture that they live here... I definitely think that they
think the way they dance, the way they look, the way they play capoeira makes them
irresistible (laugh). (Field notes)
In the locker room, I also learn wheat tourists were whispering about during the studio’s
performances. Female tourists spent much time in the changing room discussing these “hot black
guys” and ranking their attractiveness. One Serbian tourist announced to the group of women
that she “just wanted to do them all.” The men were especially visible compared to the mostly
light skin toned female tourists. Jennifer, who had just completed a Master’s program in
counseling in the US, was in Brazil for several months to practice capoeira. She told me in an
interview, “Here I feel like anything I do gets a lot of attention from the guys… because I’m
white, because I’m not a beginner, because they proposition me for sex. Just about every guy has
propositioned me.”
27
Apelidos – capoeira nicknames – also connected physical bodies to blackness. Students of
darker skin tone often bore apelidos that called attention to this characteristic: Bantu – the name
of an African ethnic group – was the apelido of a tall lanky dark skin toned nineteen-year-old
student. Cana, or sugar cane, was the name of a twenty-five year old advanced student. His
name, as he explained to me, referred to his dark skin, which made him look like he could be a
slave harvesting cane on a plantation. Senzala, also commonly referred to as The Rasta due to his
long dreadlocks, was named after slave dwellings on large plantations. The lighter skin toned
students were named for their speed, style, or other characteristic. Some practitioners came to
expect interactions with tourists and preemptively offered further information they assumed the
tourists desired. For example, one practitioner would preemptively relate the history of his
apelido – a reference to the slave fields of Bahia – whenever tourists asked about his name.
Even when Brazilian practitioners were not attending to their black body or hairstyle and
were not especially aware of the performative nature of, say, holding a berimbau, these symbols
remained as cues with which others could attach meanings of blackness in interactions,
observations, and later in private conversation.
Tourists did not see all Brazilian practitioners as black. Practitioners with light skin tone
were overlooked by most tourist attention in and out of classes. The importance of skin tone was
brought home by numerous reactions to the light skin-toned master. He was often referred to as a
“strange guy” who interrupted their nightly interactions with the guys during classes. Tourists
overwhelmingly described his numerous announcements about his views on capoeira to be
annoying and ego-centric.
Interactions also connected these dark capoeira bodies to poverty and the necessity for
street smarts in Salvador. Neither the studio’s classes nor its conscious framing of capoeira
28
mentioned poverty. However, the context of Salvador and the personal biographies of the
Brazilians that interacted frequently with tourists established poverty as a meaning connected to
capoeira bodies. Most residents of Salvador are dark-skinned and poor compared with the
wealthier mostly white foreign tourists (McCallum, 2005). All interviewees (and many others in
informal conversations) mentioned poverty as a pervasive and noticeable characteristic of
Salvador when asked how they saw the city.
Tourists interpreted the Brazilian practitioners that they interacted with to be
underprivileged and the school’s middle class neighborhood – where many of the Brazilian
students lived – to be poor. Often, when tourists learned that I lived in the neighborhood, they
asked in shock, “but aren’t you afraid” or “and you feel safe there?” Several of the school’s
advanced students began training at the school as children through the school’s social service
program that provides free lessons. These students, who had grown up in poorer nearby
neighborhoods, now had regular work through capoeira, but often told tourists stories of their
poverty. Tourists often connected the apparent poverty of the city to capoeira practitioners.
It was definitely interesting to see here how capoeira does gain another importance for
someone who doesn't have anything else. For example, Mano, he comes from a very poor family
and the Mestre really took him from the street and gave him a possibility not only to have a job
but to see the world. It never would have been possible without capoeira. It's interesting to see
how much it can really be a life philosophy… But I guess it's really connected to Brazil in
general, you know wherever I went outside of Salvador, people were like yeah, Bahia, full of
malandragem.23 (Field notes)
23 Trickery or cunning.
29
4.5. Taking away Experience with Racial Others and their Culture
Almost all tourists expressed satisfaction with their experience. Tourists’ extensive
interaction with capoeira practice and practitioners provided embodied cosmopolitan lifestyle
experience. During the class, which participants paid extra for, an advanced Brazilian student
meticulously led tourists through the process of making the instrument – from tree branch and
gourd to final product – and taught the instrument’s basic rhythms. During the berimbau-making
class, which participants paid extra for, an advanced Brazilian student meticulously led tourists
through the process of making the instrument – from tree branch and gourd to final product – and
taught them three basic rhythms. Tourists rarely asked for detailed information about capoeira.
They were less interested in gaining skill playing berimbau rhythms from the berimbau
workshop than in the experience itself. Sarah, a light skin toned 20-year-old German university
student was in Salvador for a six-month internship with a cultural organization. She told me:
Yeah, I made my first berimbau with them, which was fun. Well, I didn't remember
everything, but that was a lot of information, even about the wood and what woods
you can use and how light or heavy they are. That was nice. That was a good
experience. (Field notes)
Likewise, Capoeira World allowed tourists to receive cords (equivalent to a belt system
in Asian martial arts) during the time of the annual testing ceremony, though the norm among
capoeira groups is to award cords only to regular, advancing students. Several announcements
were made preceding the event to encourage their participation (a forty dollar fee was charged
for an event t-shirt and baptismal cord). While I was there, sixteen tourists, all novices,
participated in the ceremony and received cords. Most reported to me that they would probably
not continue taking capoeira classes once back in the US and Europe but wanted to participate
30
because, as one North American told me, “I just did it for the experience, you know.” She told
me she was unlikely to look for a group in the US, saying, “It just wouldn’t be the same.”
To many tourists, the food, music, dance, capoeira, and religion of Salvador represented
Afro-Brazilianness and the city’s connection to Africa. “Being here is where the home [of
capoeira] is,” one North American tourist told me. Though a few had no specific expectations
about the culture of Salvador, the majority expected to see the stereotypical signs of Afro-Brazil
present in tour books – women selling acarajé (bean fritters) on the street dressed in Candomblé
priestess costume,24 samba dancing and music, and capoeira. These symbols created a nexus of
African-influenced culture. For example, a 28-year-old, light skin toned, North American
graphic designer explained why he had come to Salvador:
Experience the more native... to play in a place where I feel like, that is the origin of
capoeira... going out to the Pelourinho [the tourist center neighborhood] and seeing
really bad street players... to going to Mercado Modelo and seeing a million
berimbaus for sale to like seeing a billion and one tourist items that have capoeira
emblazoned on them... to learning how to dance samba... also learning about
Salvadorian African culture and seeing how it really is. That's a huge thing. (Field
notes)
Several tourists attended samba and Afro-Brazilian dance classes elsewhere, which they viewed
as related to capoeira.
Tourists were equally interested in gaining cultural experience beyond capoeira itself, and
the majority preferred hanging out with Brazilians to actually learning capoeira. Their
experiences translated into knowledge claims among tourists about Brazilian practitioners and
24 Acarajé are associated with Candomblé and street vendors often dress in Candomblé costume.
31
Brazilian culture, as they compared stories about how they gained these pieces of knowledge
from practitioners and shared photographs of their cultural encounters. Like locker room
discussions about practitioners’ necklaces, foreigners discussed the meaning of capoeira rituals,
the proper way to samba, and Brazilian behavior in general.
In addition to the many photographs taken by tourists, Capoeira World provided tourists
with several material objects to accumulate as evidence of their experiences. The pants were
popular with tourists. Many arrived in Brazil without workout pants, and were happy to purchase
them as useful souvenirs. It was common to see tourists arrive with a new pair of the pants,
smiling proudly and showing them off to the other tourists. Mindy, light skin toned a 20-year-old
North American elite university student, told me she probably would not ever wear the pants in
the US, but would keep them as a souvenir.
The berimbau class was also successful with tourists. All those I spoke with enjoyed this
class, one North American going so far as to refer to her hand-made berimbau as her filha – her
child. She joked that she had gotten carried away and considered buying a special berimbau
carrying case for fifteen dollars in the tourist center in order to get the instrument back to the US.
She told me it would likely hang on her wall. “Yeah, I’m gunna sit on my porch at home and
play my berimbau alone,” she joked.
5. Blackness and Experience in Omnivorous Consumption
By mobilizing several symbols of blackness, interactions between tourists and Brazilian
practitioners co-constructed capoeira as an authentic experience. The value of blackness relied
on two broad social processes. First, blackness became valuable due to the centrality of authentic
socially distant cultural objects, as revealed in recent work on omnivorism (Cheyne and Binder,
32
2010; Johnston and Baumann, 2007). The retooling of capoeira was consistent with this
literature. Blackness was transformed into aesthetic and geographic ties to Africa and Salvador;
the rare, exotic, and aesthetic appeal of socially distant dark toned skin and dreadlocks;
nonindustrial berimbaus hand-made by racial others; and practice embodied as a historic
manifestation of slave tradition. Associating capoeira with samba, Candomblé, and maculelé
further extended the symbols of socially and culturally distant blackness gained by tourists.
Blackness – and symbols of other socially distant racial and ethnic peoples – should become
important in other contexts of interactive consumption such as music and art venues and martial
art and bodily activities such as yoga and dance classes. Future research should attend to the
variety of ways that actors attach racial meaning to omnivorous consumption and the underlying
cultural distinctions that inform this process.
The second broad social process that granted blackness positive value was the importance
of cultural experience (Peñaloza, 2001; Thompson and Tambyah, 1999). Foreign tourists gained
not nuanced – or often even basic – skill at capoeira practice, but experiences with a racially
aesthetic version of capoeira and the human bodies of its practitioners. The experiences and
material objects they acquired abroad are more limited in availability than consumer objects at
home. For example, capoeira is practiced in the US and Europe, but the embodied claims of
knowledge about authentic capoeira and Brazilians gained through these experiences are
inaccessible to many within the US. This distinguishes tourists’ experiences with capoeira as
legitimate and excludes the capoeira knowledge and skill of non-Brazilian practitioners in their
home societies. The interactions at the studio should have provided tourists with sufficient
knowledge and experience to incorporate into their lifestyle as members of the traveled culturally
omnivorous class. How the experiences and materials acquired by tourists are enacted in the
33
tourists’ home societies is beyond the scope of this manuscript. Future work should examine this
reenactment after the moment of consumption.
The centrality of experience with producers’ bodies in the case of capoeira tourism
suggests that work on omnivorism should shift its focus to embodied interaction in consumption
contexts. This will further the goal, set forth by Johnston and Baumann (2007), to look for
cultural hierarchy within rather than across genres. The expectation suggested by my analysis is
straightforward in this regard. In addition to preferring aesthetic versions of a genre (Johnston
and Baumann, 2007), omnivores will valorize interpretations that allow them to gain significant
embodied experience. Omnivores diverge in their intensity of consumption (Chan and
Goldthorpe, 2007; Sullivan and Katz-Gerro, 2007), and these cultural tourists may represent a
special type of omnivores that distinguishes themselves from others be seeking out significant
experiential consumption. Thus, these omnivores may seek out interactions with artists,
musicians, authors, and chefs rather than simply attend cultural events. Given the growing
importance of experiential consumption (Holt, 1995; MacCannell, 1989; Thompson and
Tambyah, 1999), the interactive process of meaning-making described above should provide
insight into a variety of contexts such music, art, dance, and food consumption.
34
References
Assuncão, M., 2005. Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art. Routledge, New
York.
Atkinson, W., 2011. The Context and Genesis of Musical Tastes: Omnivorousness Debunked,
Bourdieu Buttressed. Poetics.
Bennett, T., Savage, E. Silva, Warde, A., Gayo-Cal, M., Wright, D., 2009. Culture, Class,
Distinction. Routledge, London.
Bourdieu, P., 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Browning, B., 1995. Headspin: Capoeira's Ironic Inversion, Samba: Resistance in Motion.
Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Brubaker, R., Loveman, M., Stamatov, P., 2004. Ethnicity as Cognition. Theory and Society 33,
31-64.
Bruner, E., 2005. The Maasai and the Lion King: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Globalization in
African Tourism, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, pp. 71-100.
Burawoy, M., 1998. The Extended Case Method. Sociological Theory 16, 4-33.
Chan, T., Goldthorpe, J., 2007. Social Stratification and Cultural Consumption: The Visual Arts
in England. Poetics 35, 168-190.
Cheyne, A., Binder, A., 2010. Cosmopolitan Preferences: The Constitutive Role of Place in
American Elite Taste for Hip-Hop Music 1991-2005. Poetics 38, 336-364.
Chong, P., 2011. Reading Difference: How Race and Ethnicity Function as Tools for Critical
Appraisal. Poetics.
35
Cornell, S., Hartmann, D., 2007. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World.
Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks.
de Campos Rosario, C., Stephens, N., Delamont, S., 2010. ‘I'm your Teacher, I'm
Brazilian!’Authenticity and Authority in European Capoeira. Sport, Education and Society 15,
103-120.
Delamont, S., Stephens, N., 2008. Up on the Roof: The Embodied Habitus of Diasporic
Capoeira. Cultural Sociology 57, 57-74.
DiMaggio, P., Mukhtar, T., 2004. Arts Participation as Cultural Capital in the United States,
1982–2002: Signs of Decline? Poetics 32, 169-194.
Downey, G., 2010. 'Practice without Theory': A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied
Learning. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, S22-S40.
Emerson, R.M., Fretz, R., Shaw, L., 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Figueiredo, A., 1994. O Mercado da Boa Aparência: As Cabeleireiras Negras. Análysis & Dados
3, 33-36.
Fine, G.A., 2003. Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art. Theory
and Society 32, 153-180.
Garcia-Alvarez, E., Katz-Gerro, T., López-Sintas, J., 2007. Deconstructing Cultural
Omnivorousness 1982-2002: Heterology in Americans' Musical Preferences. Social Forces 86,
417-443.
Gotham, K., 2007. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy. New
York University Press, New York.
36
Grazian, D., 2003. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. University
of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Han, S.-K., 2003. Unraveling the Brow: What and How of Choice in Musical Preference.
Sociological Perspectives 46, 435-459.
Holt, D., 1995. How Consumers Consume: A Typology of Consumption Practices. Journal of
Consumer Research 22, 1-16.
Holt, D., 1997. Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's Theory of Tastes from its Critics.
Poetics 25, 93-120.
Johnson, E.P., 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity.
Duke University Press, Durham.
Johnston, J., Baumann, S., 2007. Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in
Gourmet Food Writing. American Journal of Sociology 113, 165-204.
Joseph, J., 2008. The Logical Paradox of the Cultural Commodity: Selling an “Authentic” Afro-
Brazilian Martial Art in Canada. Sociology of Sport Journal 25, 498-515.
Lewis, A., 2003. Everyday Race-Making: Navigating Racial Boundaries in Schools. American
Behavioral Scientist 47, 283-305.
Lewis, J.L., 1992. Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lizardo, O., Strand, M., 2010. Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the
Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology. Poetics 38, 204-
227.
Loez, A.M.e.D., 2005. Capoeira: Danca de Combat. Demi Lune ASA Editions, Paris.
37
Louis, R.S., Chandler, G.P., Draffen, A., Green, M., 2005. Lonely Planet Brazil, 6th ed. Lonely
Planet Publications.
Lu, S., Fine, G.A., 1995. The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social
Accomplishment. The Sociological Quarterly 36, 535-553.
MacCannell, D., 1989. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. University of
California, Berkeley.
McCallum, C., 2005. Racialized Bodies, Naturalized Classes: Moving through the City of
Salvador da Bahia. American Ethnologist 32, 100-117.
Mowforth, M., Munt, I., 2009. A New Class of Tourist: Trendies on the Trail, in: Mowforth, M.,
Munt, I. (Eds.), Tourism and Sustainability: Development, Globalization and New Tourism in
the Third World. Routledge, New York, pp. 120-147.
Nagel, J., 1994. Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.
Social Problems 41, 152-176.
Nash, D., Smith, V.L., 1991. Anthropology and Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 18, 12-25.
Ollivier, M., 2008. Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical, and
Indifferent. Poetics 36, 120-147.
Omi, M., Winant, H., 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s.
Routledge Press, New York.
Peñaloza, L., 2001. Consuming the American West: Animating Cultural Meaning and Memory
at a Stock Show and Rodeo. Journal of Consumer Research 28, 369-398.
Peterson, R., 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago.
38
Peterson, R., Kern, R., 1996. Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore. American
Sociological Review 61, 900-907.
Roy, W.G., 2004. “Race Records” and “Hillbilly Music”: Institutional Origins of Racial
Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry. Poetics 32, 265-279.
Sansone, L., 2003. Blackness without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil. Palgrave
Macmillan, New York.
Santos, J.T.d., 2005. O Poder da Cultura e a Cultura no Poder: A Disputa Simbólica da herança
Cultural Negra no Brasil. Edufba, Salvador.
SCT, 2005. Século XXI: Consolidação do Turismo. Secretaria da Cultura e Turismo, Salvador,
Brasil.
Sheriff, R., 2000. Exposing Silence as Cultural Censorship: A Brazilian Case American
Anthropologist 102, 114-132.
Soar, M., 2001. Engines and Acolytes of Consumption: Black Male Bodies, Advertising and the
Laws of Thermodynamics. Body & Society 7, 37-55.
Sullivan, O., Katz-Gerro, T., 2007. The Omnivore Thesis Revisited: Voracious Cultural
Consumers. European Sociological Review 23, 123-137.
Thompson, C., Tambyah, S.K., 1999. Trying to be Cosmopolitan. Journal of Consumer Research
26, 214-241.
Travassos, S., 1999. Mandinga: Notas Etnográficas sobre o Utilização de Simbolos Etnicos na
Capoeiragem. Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 67-79.
Van Eijck, K., 2001. Social Differentiation in Musical Taste Patterns. Social Forces 79, 1163-
1185.
Top Related